Building on the Success of Rethink Afghanistan

When Brave New Foundation first launched our anti-Afghanistan-War campaign in 2009, 63 percent of Americans favored the president’s plan to escalate the war. Now, roughly 60 percent of Americans oppose the Afghanistan War and a strong plurality of Americans want to remove troops “ASAP.”

Rethink Afghanistan played a critical early role framing the war as a conflict not worth the huge costs, helping to shift the national consensus from supporting escalation to a strong desire to end a failing and unpopular war.

Some of Rethink Afghanistan’s biggest successes include:

- Publishing a full-length documentary that “laid the intellectual track” for opposition to escalation and counterinsurgency in Afghanistan.

- Busting the myth that there was a national consensus about the need to escalate the Afghanistan War in 2009. Rethink Afghanistan organized online debates among opinion-leaders on both sides of the issue and rallied academics and opinion-leaders to publicly call for other options besides escalation.

- Breaking through the Washington, D.C. bubble: With the financial contributions of Rethink Afghanistan supporters, we were able to run a full-page ad in Politico, a leading Capitol Hill newspaper, calling for the rapid withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan.